Adaptation of the Human Gut Microbiota Metabolic Network During the First Year After Birth

Predicting the metabolic behavior of the human gut microbiota in different contexts is one of the most promising areas of constraint-based modeling. Recently, we presented a supra-organismal approach to build context-specific metabolic networks of bacterial communities using functional and taxonomic assignments of meta-omics data. In this work, this algorithm is applied to elucidate the metabolic changes induced over the first year after birth in the gut microbiota of a cohort of Spanish infants. We used metagenomics data of fecal samples and nutritional data of 13 infants at five time points. The resulting networks for each time point were analyzed, finding significant alterations once sol…